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Edison has ballooned into the kind of fat person who overspills airline seats, gets shoved into alcoves in restaurants, eats obsessively and has opted (in one of many choice phrases) for "suicide by pie".
If you 'love' that loudmouth it's a kneejerk genetic thing; I'm supposed to be the real love of your life. The basics: Big Brother is the story of Pandora, who grew up in Los Angeles with a father who starred on a popular 1970's family sitcom with parallels to her life.Harhar sigh*) I so wanted to root for Edison to escape this abusive partner of a book and strike out into a world that could have dealt with his depression in a supportive way. And yeah, she had a few interesting things to say and said a few things in interesting ways, but I just couldn't CARE after she just kept GOING and going and going. Then, to make matters even worse, she uses this cheap plot device at the end that made me feel like I totally wasted my time reading the story. And I understand that her real-life brother died from morbid obesity, weighing approximately what she puts her "big brother" at in the book, but it doesn't appear as if she spent any real time with her brother or talked to anyone who's ever spent substantial time around people who struggle with this kind of weight issue. There is a sound reason – it's a demand of the denouement – that one section should be slightly hazier than the other.
But for me, the story just wasn't "big" enough to really deal with them or interesting enough to hold my attention.
She had so many killer-awesome sentences - I ‘had’ to open up my ebook and read her words - I almost wished I had the physical book. But the biggest sin to me is the book's ending, which pretty much made everything you read up to that point meaningless. A sudden death wish, pursued through the medium of fried foods, could be very distressing to watch in a sibling; but as for Fletcher he is merely the brother-in-law, doesn't even like the guy, and despises Edison for his weakness.
Lionel Shriver's novels include the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and has now sold over a million copies worldwide. And this is what it was like: Imagine if I told you that a very interesting special was going to be on tv, but it was only going to air once and you couldn't record it because you don't have a DVR or anything. Would Pandora really have risked her marriage and her relationship with her step children to help her brother lose weight? I felt Pandora's revulsion when she picks her brother up from the airport, I felt Pandora's conflict between doing what was right for her brother, at times at great sacrifice to her family and it made perfect sense that the lengths to whcih she went to save her brother both failed and were a total fantasy on her part.So, that's the first thing I want to say about this book, because in truth, even with an interesting premise (and this sort of had one), with writing like that, there's only so much you can enjoy it.
As with all Shriver's novels, the best parts were the moral inquiries I will be turning over long after I turn over the last page.Pop culture references contribute to a cutesey atmosphere unredeemed by scenes dealing with the grim realities of family life and even one devoted to an over-running toilet that may be intended as transcendence through grossness (you know, like in The Corrections). In an interview, which is included in the end of the novel, she says that when she decided to go with "option d", it changed how she wrote the book because she then wrote Part II as especially unbelievable. Shriver is brilliant on the novel shock that is hunger, on how it feels to lose the crucial sense of punctuation (and motivation) that mealtimes give you. She has a great couple of pages describing the difference between the feelings of the “scrawnies”, the average-weight people, and the obese.
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